Partnering with innovators

When I was 15 years old, I picked up a paper route for my surrounding neighborhood. I was responsible for delivering to over 100 houses. In the very early morning hours, I would collect the newspaper stacks and individually assemble and wrap the day’s circulation into 100 packages that barely fit onto my bicycle’s handlebars. It wasn’t easy for me to complete the deliveries before heading off to school. I quickly realized I didn’t have enough time or storage capacity on my bike to do all of this and began to fall behind in my deliveries. That’s when I decided to partner with my older brother. He was already driving and owned a car — with a sunroof! He agreed to drive me around my route in exchange for a piece of my monthly profits. 

Partnering with my brother changed everything. I was able to stand up through the opening in his sunroof and toss my papers efficiently and much more quickly. I ended up being able to service more accounts while doing it faster, with time to spare before school. It was a valuable lesson about the power of partnership, not just for my bottom line; but for my ability to provide exceptional service to my customers.

I haven’t forgotten my paperboy roots. At Talkdesk, we form relationships with companies to integrate their innovations into our platform. For example, we’ve partnered with Calldesk, a European pioneer in AI-powered voice agents, to accelerate the deployment of conversational AI in contact centers. This means Talkdesk customers can use conversational AI, giving them a better experience and freeing up human agents to focus on the more complex tasks. Both companies bring something to the table, and the result is a stronger and better customer experience (CX). Win-win.

We also invited nine of our AppConnect partners to the first Talkdesk Digital Showdown: Innovations in CX. Each innovator had three minutes to convince attendees they had the best app to improve CX. A live audience watched the demos, compared the apps and voted for the winner. Krisp, an organization that develops technology to eliminate background noise in any communication app, was the winner, earning a $10,000 donation from Talkdesk for the Alameda County Food Bank. All partners had a $1,000 donation from Talkdesk made to their charity of choice just for participating.

Beyond the good done for charity, we again saw the value of pushing each other as innovators to get further and create new solutions. These relationships help us define that “better together” story, just like I did with my brother. Because sometimes it’s easier to throw the newspaper out of the sunroof than trying to ride around all alone on your bike.